Market research is an important business tool which permits manufacturers, retailers, financial institutions, and others to cost-effectively target their marketing and sales activities and efficiently reach potential customers. These organizations rely heavily on market data in planning new products, sales strategies and promotions, and when making a variety of other sales and marketing related business decisions.
In the past, marketing data has been collected in several ways. Typically, market research firms are employed to collect data using surveys, questionnaires, and other costly and time-consuming techniques. This information is then processed using statistical techniques in an effort to extrapolate therefrom significant trends in consumer behavior. Although based on statistically significant correlations, these techniques cannot with absolute precision determine the buying patterns of particular population segments or individual consumers. Indeed, as recognized in the art, such surveys often yield inaccurate and misleading results.
In contrast, some organizations, particularly large retailers, collect marketing data by tracking sales transactions at the retailers' points of sale. This technique, however, provides only crude data such as the number and types of items sold by the merchant. It does not provide detailed data regarding sales patterns of particular socioeconomic groups or individual customers.
To collect more precise data, retailers sometimes provide customers with "preferred customer" cards or the like. The "preferred customer" card typically comprises a customer identification number linked to a database record which stores information relating to the customer's past purchases. Each time the customer makes a purchase, the merchant scans or manually enters the customer identification number from the "preferred customer" card into the merchant's point of sale (POS) computer. The merchant then scans or manually enters the identification codes of the items purchased by the customer. Typically, the identification code employed to identify each product may be the product's Universal Product Code (UPC). In this way, it is possible to collect data regarding the purchasing patterns of particular customers.
This technique, too, has several drawbacks. First, it only collects sales data of the particular retailer who issued the "preferred customer" card. It does not permit data collected by a first retailer to be integrated and cross-referenced with data collected by other retailers. The collected data may therefore provide a significantly skewed perspective of a customer's purchasing patterns as a whole.
Furthermore, such systems require that the customer bring his or her card to the retailer's POS. To that end, retailers have been forced to offer a variety of incentives, such as discounts on particular items, in order to induce customers to carry and use their "preferred customer" cards. Notwithstanding such incentives, many customers forget to bring their cards to the POS.
Moreover, the systems require significant hardware and software resources to collect and maintain the collected data. Frequently, the customer data is transmitted from a remote retail site to a central computer maintained by the merchant. This marketing data infrastructure is often completely separate from the merchant's sales data infrastructure and thus leads to wasteful duplicative processing of the transaction data being collected.